Concrete problems tend to start small, with micro-cracks expanding and exposing rebar to corrosive water, oxygen, carbon dioxide and chlorides that compromise structural integrity — but what if those cracks could be caught early, before they spread, then filled automatically by a dormant fungus?

Congrui Jin has been working the problem for years, and recently published “Interactions of fungi with concrete: significant importance for bio-based self-healing concrete” in the academic journal Construction & Building Materials.

“This idea was originally inspired by the miraculous ability of the human body to heal itself of cuts, bruises and broken bones,” said Jin of her work. “For the damaged skins and tissues, the host will take in nutrients that can produce new substitutes to heal the damaged parts.”

Like an immune system, the idea here is to put the ingredients in place throughout a structure, by adding fungi and nutrients to concrete as it is mixed. And Jin’s research represents the “first application of fungi for self-healing concrete, a low-cost, pollution-free and sustainable approach.”

She and her colleagues have experimented and found Trichoderma reesei to have the right combination of properties for their purposes. From there, “the fungal spores, together with nutrients, will be placed into the concrete matrix during the mixing process,” explains Jin.

“When cracking occurs, water and oxygen will find their way in. With enough water and oxygen, the dormant fungal spores will germinate, grow and precipitate calcium carbonate to heal the cracks.” Then, when the cracks are filled, the fungi form new spores that lie in wait for future issues to arise.

This isn’t just about fixing buildings, streets and bridges, though many of these are suffering from lower public works budgets  — critical infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, also use concrete as part of their radiation shielding.

Jin and her colleagues still face challenges in adapting the fungi to be sufficiently robust and enduring in various climates and with differing nutrient availability, but are making progress toward an eventual commercially available solution. Meanwhile, other parallel strategies are also being explored, including the use of sunlight and algae to create self-healing cement.

Turning agricultural waste and fungal mycelium into construction materials, this do-it-yourself kit lets you grow your own compostable bio-plastic objects, from packaging furniture to surf boards and architectural building blocks.

Providing a natural alternative to synthetic options, Ecovative’s Mushroom Materials line competes on cost with petroleum-based equivalents and can be shaped in all kinds of ways using custom and reusable molds.

Their latest creation is this home Grow It Yourself kit – they will ship you the organic components (a mixture of crop waste, like corn husks and stalks, and the vegetative part of mushroom fungus). Upon receipt, you can wait and leave things in a dry dormant state, or add water and fit the mixture into a mold to build whatever you want – nature and time take care of the rest.

So far, Mushroom Materials have been used to make everything from award-winning architectural creations (using blocks made out of organic matter) to biodegradable surf boards, flower pots, lamps and other everyday objects.

From Evocative: “We grow materials made from agricultural byproducts and mushroom mycelium. Mycelium is a natural, self-assembling glue, digesting crop waste to produce cost-competitive and environmentally responsible materials that perform. Our large-scale grow factories are truly revolutionary. We harness the power of nature – the cleanest technology on Earth, eliminating the pollution generated across the petroleum-based plastics supply chain.”

Breaking down one of the most difficult types of trash, this incredible working incubator turns sterilized plastic remnants into nutritional biomass humans can consume and digest, in short: food. Texture, taste and flavor depend upon the strain of fungus, but reportedly can be quite strong as well as quite sweet.

Livin Studio, an Austrian design group known for innovative work on insect farms, has built a working model of this growth sphere (dubbed the Fungi Mutarium) that takes parts of mushrooms usually left uneaten and grows them into fresh snacks.

From the creators: “We were working with fungi named Schizophyllum Commune and Pleurotus Ostreatus. They are found throughout the world and can be seen on a wide range of timbers and many other plant-based substrates virtually anywhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia. Next to the property of digesting toxic waste materials, they are also commonly eaten. As the fungi break down the plastic ingredients and don’t store them, like they do with metals, they are edible.”

In terms of the process, “Fungi Mutarium is a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass, mainly the mycelium, as a novel food product. Fungi is cultivated on specifically designed agar shapes that the designers called FU.  Agar is a seaweed based gelatin substitute and acts, mixed with starch and sugar, as a nutrient base for the fungi. The FUs are filled with plastics. The fungi is then inserted, it digests the plastic and overgrows the whole substrate. The shape of the FU is designed so that it holds the plastic and to offer the fungi a lot of surface to grow on. “

For now, the digestion is a relatively slow process, taking up to a few months for a set of cultures to fully mature, but by the standards of plastic biodegrading in nature this is still an extraordinary feat. The team continues to work with university researchers to make the process faster and more efficient. “Scientific research has shown that fungi can degrade toxic and persistent waste materials such as plastics, converting them into edible fungal biomass.”

This novel application comes just a few years after a group of Yale students discovered a species of fungi on a trip to Ecuador as part of a Rainforest Expedition and Labratory led by a molecular biochemist (with findings subsequently published in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Biology). Even in the absence of light and air, the species they examined thrived in landfill environments, suggesting potential near-future and larger-scale solution for existing waste sites as well.